Latest news with #KevinRowland
BBC News
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Dexys frontman Kevin Rowland remembers 'magical' Wolverhampton
Dexys Midnight Runners frontman Kevin Rowland has spoken of his love for said growing up there had been "magical", adding he continued to support Wolves when, aged 11, his family moved to London where he was teased at school for his Wolverhampton - known for songs including Come on Eileen and Geno - shared the memories while in contemplative mood for the release of his autobiography Bless Me 71-year-old revealed that away from his "very strict" Irish Catholic family, he had a "wild side" growing up, and recalled a time he got caught shoplifting at a shop on Dudley Road. His brother had told him to "just grab anything, don't matter what it is," he said. Rowland helped himself to a tin of dog food and was spotted by the of Wolverhampton also include the music and fashion of the time."I can remember standing outside the ABC in Wolverhampton," he said, "watching them all queuing up, all the teddy boys with their cool haircuts, winkle-pickers, tight trousers; girls with their beehives - incredible."When his family moved to London, he said he was laughed at because of his "broad Wolverhampton accent", when he gave a speech in school he said he was determined to continue attending Wolves matches, despite living in Harrow, although he was becoming "obsessed with the singing". After starting out in his brother's band, he said he felt he had a "blank page" when he started Dexys Midnight said there was a determination to make it work and he insisted all the band members he recruited had to quit their jobs and practice eight hours a day, five days a week for six months until they were ready to they found success in the 1980s he said he felt "vindicated" for his persistence, but he also had said: "It was so many boys and girls' dream and it was certainly my dream to have the success that I had, but I wish I'd been able to enjoy it more."I got stressed out really and took it all a bit seriously and didn't go out much and enjoy it. I just kind of worked."Rowland said he still loved music though and he planned to release a new album next year."I do feel like I've got a second wind," he said. "I don't know where it comes from." Follow BBC Wolverhampton & Black Country on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
Irish Times
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Dexys' Kevin Rowland: ‘Growing up in England, you had an inferiority complex. Our dads were judged as scruffy Paddies'
It was the last great debut single of the 1970s, a scorched-earth soul song with an upstart attitude. Before a note sounded it had made a statement: radio interference, a snatch of Deep Purple, then the Sex Pistols , then The Specials, then an earnest young man's voice declaring, 'For God's sake, burn it down'. Dexys Midnight Runners ' Dance Stance was a declaration of culture war delivered by a second-generation-Irish Wolverhampton/London/Birmingham transplant who sounded like Jackie Wilson on uppers. He came mob-handed, backed by what looked like a gang of stevedores wearing woolly caps and donkey jackets. The single sounded exuberant but felt revolutionary, a reclamation of Celtic soul that namechecked a litany of Hibernian writers – Oscar Wilde , Brendan Behan , Seán O'Casey , Bernard Shaw , Samuel Beckett , Eugene O'Neill , Edna O'Brien and Laurence Sterne . For an Irish kid, hearing such names blasting from the BBC in the age of Margaret Thatcher , H-blocks and hunger strikes seemed radical. 'It was written from anger, from rage, from hearing Irish joke after Irish joke around where I was living – Smethwick, which is a real working-class area just outside Birmingham,' says Kevin Rowland , Dexys' leader, who has just written his memoir, Bless Me Father: A Life Story. READ MORE 'I just thought, This is f**king ridiculous. The people telling those jokes were not the f**king brightest tools in the box by any means, and they would be laughing at the Irish. And they weren't just Irish jokes; they were anti-Irish jokes.' The cover of Dexys' debut album, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, released in the summer of 1980, featured a photograph of a 13-year-old Catholic Belfast boy carrying all his belongings, forced from his home because of 'civil unrest'. 'The cover of that album at that time, especially in Birmingham – probably more so later in 1982, when we started to bring more Irish influences, with Come on Eileen, or singing a little bit in Irish at the end of The Waltz – it felt subversive, because there was such hostility. 'No one wanted to hear anything about Ireland, especially in Birmingham so shortly after those pub bombings, which were horrendous. So it felt like almost sneaking it in. I just felt a f**king need to do it.' Kevin Rowland of Dexys Midnight Runners. Photograph: Nicky Johnston Much of Rowland's book represents a coming to terms with his lineage, exploring that singular position occupied by second-generation Irish musicians in Britain in the post-punk years: John Lydon , Shane MacGowan , Elvis Costello , Siobhán Fahey, the Smiths . Has he compared notes with any of his contemporaries? 'Strangely enough I have done, I've talked to Johnny Marr a little bit about it, more on email than anything else. Siobhán Fahey' – of Bananarama and Shakespears Sister – 'is a good friend. We have a good laugh. If I see her socially, before long I'll start talking to her, like, 'Howya! By God, ye're a fine woman!' We can go on like that for an hour,' Rowland says. 'The thing about those second-generation musicians, from John Lydon right through to Oasis , with most of our fathers working on building sites, there's not an also-ran among them. They're all at the cutting edge of their culture. 'It's incredible, really. Look at the population of Ireland and the population of England: a disproportionate amount of significant players were second-generation Irish.' A passage from the latter part of Bless Me Father takes a more metaphysical angle: 'As I drove from Knock airport to Crossmolina, past all the barren, rocky fields, it struck me that Mayo is almost deserted – still decimated from the potato blight of 1845 to 1850. And it is haunted. There is no other word for it. I looked over the deserted fields where villages once were, and I could feel spirits crying out to be heard.' Does he think our songs and stories come from expression of unresolved trauma? 'I don't know if it has to come out in stories or music, but I think we're definitely haunted by trauma. I never even heard about the Famine in childhood. My parents didn't mention it. I probably was in my 20s when I found out about it. Absolutely zero taught in school. No mention of Ireland,' Rowland says. Dexys Midnight Runners in 1982. Photograph: Brian Cooke/Redferns 'Growing up in England, it was impossible not to have a bit of an inferiority complex, because it was foisted upon you. We were obviously poorer than the English, and our dads were judged as scruffy Paddies. 'There was a study in the 1980s or 1990s about Irish people emigrating to England. I read it out as part of a speech for my dad's 90th-birthday party. I think the British government commissioned it. An Indian lady did the study, and she concluded that something like 30 or 40 per cent of Irish immigrants were more likely to suffer from heart disease , cancer , alcoholism etc, than the Irish that stayed at home. 'That's the irony, because they came for a better life. They fared less well than the host nation and less well than immigrants from other countries and Irish emigrants that went to America or wherever.' Perhaps as a reaction to all this austerity, Rowland and his contemporaries deployed sartorial self-expression as a way of asserting pride and individuality. Yet he was riddled by self-doubt. Rowland grew up at odds with his father and his environment, a juvenile delinquent given to thieving and truancy. Something miraculous happened when he assembled the first Dexys line-up. What was the click? 'It was the music and the clothes. I just had a vision. I'd been in all this trouble, I had all this stuff from my old man and was very much seen in the family as the one who was going nowhere, or to prison, and that carried on into my 20s,' Rowland says. 'And so all of a sudden, when The Killjoys' – his first band – 'broke up I had it in my mind to form this soul band. I thought, people are going to want to dance again; people are going to want to go look good again. 'I didn't know much about brass, but I knew we'd have a brass section. I felt on a mission, and the clothes were part of it, because style had gone out with punk. It became kind of standard. It lost its edge. 'And the fact that I'd trained in hairdressing, and by that time I was pretty good at it, I just thought, shit, my whole f**king life has been leading to this music, hair, clothes: put it all together.' That newfound zeal was infectious. Dexys all agreed to sign on the dole to devote themselves to writing, rehearsing and playing gigs. They bunked on to trains without paying, practised in squats and arts centres, lifted gear. And somewhere along the way they conceived a look – a Birmingham version of On the Waterfront – that was as striking in its way as The Clash or The Specials. 'It was a good look,' Rowland says, 'but it painted us into a corner. There wasn't really anywhere we could go from there. If we'd started off with the wild stuff, the asymmetric hair and the big trousers, and then delved into that New York docker look for a couple of months and then something else, that would have been great. But we were presenting it as real, as opposed to, 'These are some cool clothes we're wearing'. 'And we were playing this music that had depth in the same way as Roxy Music. You listen to early Roxy Music – If There Is Something, on the first album – there's real yearning going on there. The guy is singing from his pain. He's pouring his heart out. The arrangement is incredible. And then we could have moved on. 'It was a bit of a dark period when the first band broke up, late 1980. Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran started to come through wearing what we'd been wearing, and all of a sudden they're the new thing; we're not the new thing. It was quite tough – so tough that I f**king buried it. It was only, like, 20 years later that I woke up and thought, sh*t.' The disappointment didn't prevent him from immediately conceiving a new sound, a post-punk take on Van Morrison's album Saint Dominic's Preview, wedded to a prototypal raggle-taggle look: dungarees, curly hair, earrings, hobo chic. The Too-Rye-Ay album anticipated The Pogues, The Waterboys and even Elvis Costello's and U2's defections towards roots and acoustic music. The single Come On Eileen was huge, but the band apparently didn't receive much money from its success. The next album, Don't Stand Me Down, one of the lost classics of the 1980s, cost a fortune to record and sold poorly. Rowland wouldn't see royalties from his boom years until as late as 2014. From the late 1980s to the millennium he was as humbled as a star could be, spiralling from drug addiction to the dole queue to borderline homelessness. For years his earnings were attached and his debts were so grievous it looked as if they might outlive him. 'I was bitter for a long time,' he says. 'But you can't stay bitter. I dwelled on that shit for years, man. There was a long period of inactivity. We did an album in 1985, I did a solo thing in 1988; the next one was 1999, then after that it was 2012. 'The biggest thing was when I got into recovery from cocaine addiction, you learn to deal with your resentments. I had to work really hard at it.' In the end, Bless Me Father's real narrative arc is that of the prodigal son. After years of conflict and resentment, he finally made peace when his father had a stroke. 'I thought, we'll never be close. I just accepted it. And then something happened. He had that stroke, and he just softened completely. I was able to hug him, and it was incredible.' I ask if Rowland learned anything about himself from the process of writing the book. He pauses for a full 20 seconds before answering. 'I think one of the things I learned is that I used to beat myself up for some of the decisions I've made. We've talked about them: changing the look, not being more successful, not taking the opportunities that were there, not following up on things in a career way kind of way. 'But when I think about it, to be quite honest, given my background, it's a bit of a miracle that I had any success in the music business. I did reach that conclusion right at the end of it: 'F**king hell!'' Bless Me Father: A Life Story is published by Ebury Spotlight
The Guardian
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Bless Me Father by Kevin Rowland review – the Dexys Midnight Runners frontman tells all
In the summer of 1979, Dexys Midnight Runners were a band you would have been hard-pushed to describe as anything other than unique. Their sound was a pugilistic update of classic 60s soul, topped with frontman Kevin Rowland's extraordinary vocals, impassioned to the point that he permanently sounded on the verge of tears. It was fervent and a little retro, perfect for a musical climate in which mod and ska revivals were already bubbling. But Dexys' image threw a spanner in the works. 'I wore a white 1930s shirt and big baggy light-grey trousers tucked into white football socks just below the knee to give the effect of 'plus fours',' writes Rowland of a typical outfit. 'I wore pink Mary Jane ballet shoes and my hair swept back, Valentino style.' Other members appear on stage clad in jodhpurs and satin harem pants. The disparity between how they sound and how they look is so disconcerting, even their manager seems baffled. After a gig supporting the Specials, at which their appearance so enrages the crowd that the band have to be locked in a dressing room ('for our own safety'), they tone things down completely and begin taking to the stage in donkey jackets and mariner-style beanie hats. Within months, they're at No 1 with Geno, both one of pop's great hymns to itself and a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: a moving exploration of the galvanising effect music can have on a young mind that sounded tough enough to guarantee youth club dancefloors were flooded with teenage boys the second its horn riff kicked in. But Rowland is disappointed: he hankers after the days of ballet shoes and harem pants. 'As a result of that decision to change our look,' he writes, 'I feel we missed the opportunity to become the most culturally significant and coolest group of the 1980s … I've tortured myself about it over the years.' As the reader of Bless Me Father swiftly realises, this is a characteristic response: Rowland really doesn't appear to have enjoyed being the mastermind of Dexys Midnight Runners at all during their 80s heyday. There were some standard problems: poor management, terrible contracts and intra-band turbulence (someone is always mutinying against Rowland's autocratic leadership). But there's also the sense that Rowland was hellbent on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The success of the 1982 single Come on Eileen – a transatlantic No 1 – is marred by his belief that he's stolen its soul-meets-Irish-folk sound from a former Dexys member's new band. When their ambitious next album, Don't Stand Me Down, fails commercially, Rowland seems utterly crushed, baffled that the public who happily ta-loo-rye-ayed along to Come on Eileen can't stomach 12-minute songs replete with spoken-word dialogue, lyrics that explore Anglo-Irish politics and indeed the band's new clean-cut Ivy League image. He descends into a ruinous cocaine addiction, which is recounted in harrowing detail. By the early 90s, he's effectively squatting in a bedsit: unable to pay his rent, his landlord has turned off the electricity and gas. The root of Rowland's problems appears to lie in his background. The youngest son of an Irish immigrant family, his labourer father seems to have decided he was trouble virtually the minute he was born, for reasons that aren't entirely clear. Rowland initially tries to please, but when that fails, sets about living up to the billing. Insecurity plays out as screw-you aggression: compulsively thieving and fighting, he is a regular fixture in the juvenile courts. It makes for a picaresque story, albeit one that you occasionally read in a state of dread – oh God, what's he going to do next? – and Rowland tells it with an impressive lack of self-pity. Quite the opposite. Before, during and after Dexys' success, Rowland's tone is almost self-lacerating, filled with apologies directed at everyone from the girlfriend he gets pregnant, then abandons (he meets his daughter for the first time when she is 17) to David Bowie (who offers Dexys a support slot, only for Rowland to call him 'a poor man's Bryan Ferry' on stage). 'I was,' he offers flatly at one point, 'such a dick.' If anything, the reader could do with hearing more about what Rowland got right: the actual music Dexys released is almost uniformly magnificent, but here it often feels a little overshadowed, drowned out by the ructions surrounding its making, or by the author's nagging sense of 'what if?' But Bless Me Father is still powerful and oddly persuasive. Even as he seems to despair of himself, you wind up rooting for Rowland, never more so than when he conquers his addictions and releases his 1999 comeback album, My Beauty. A collection of cover versions, he promotes it while exploring his 'feminine side', in makeup, dresses and heels. The incredulity and hostility this provokes makes for sobering reading: a useful corrective to the current wave of rosy-hued 90s nostalgia. The album itself was reissued in 2020 to widespread acclaim, part of a fresh, if intermittent, wave of Dexys activity that sober and reflective Rowland seems less minded to find fault with: he ends Bless Me Father as content as you expect he's ever going to be. Bless Me Father by Kevin Rowland is published by Ebury Spotlight (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Bless Me Father by Kevin Rowland review – the Dexys Midnight Runners frontman tells all
In the summer of 1979, Dexys Midnight Runners were a band you would have been hard-pushed to describe as anything other than unique. Their sound was a pugilistic update of classic 60s soul, topped with frontman Kevin Rowland's extraordinary vocals, impassioned to the point that he permanently sounded on the verge of tears. It was fervent and a little retro, perfect for a musical climate in which mod and ska revivals were already bubbling. But Dexys' image threw a spanner in the works. 'I wore a white 1930s shirt and big baggy light-grey trousers tucked into white football socks just below the knee to give the effect of 'plus fours',' writes Rowland of a typical outfit. 'I wore pink Mary Jane ballet shoes and my hair swept back, Valentino style.' Other members appear on stage clad in jodhpurs and satin harem pants. The disparity between how they sound and how they look is so disconcerting, even their manager seems baffled. After a gig supporting the Specials, at which their appearance so enrages the crowd that the band have to be locked in a dressing room ('for our own safety'), they tone things down completely and begin taking to the stage in donkey jackets and mariner-style beanie hats. Within months, they're at No 1 with Geno, both one of pop's great hymns to itself and a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: a moving exploration of the galvanising effect music can have on a young mind that sounded tough enough to guarantee youth club dancefloors were flooded with teenage boys the second its horn riff kicked in. But Rowland is disappointed: he hankers after the days of ballet shoes and harem pants. 'As a result of that decision to change our look,' he writes, 'I feel we missed the opportunity to become the most culturally significant and coolest group of the 1980s … I've tortured myself about it over the years.' As the reader of Bless Me Father swiftly realises, this is a characteristic response: Rowland really doesn't appear to have enjoyed being the mastermind of Dexys Midnight Runners at all during their 80s heyday. There were some standard problems: poor management, terrible contracts and intra-band turbulence (someone is always mutinying against Rowland's autocratic leadership). But there's also the sense that Rowland was hellbent on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The success of the 1982 single Come on Eileen – a transatlantic No 1 – is marred by his belief that he's stolen its soul-meets-Irish-folk sound from a former Dexys member's new band. When their ambitious next album, Don't Stand Me Down, fails commercially, Rowland seems utterly crushed, baffled that the public who happily ta-loo-rye-ayed along to Come on Eileen can't stomach 12-minute songs replete with spoken-word dialogue, lyrics that explore Anglo-Irish politics and indeed the band's new clean-cut Ivy League image. He descends into a ruinous cocaine addiction, which is recounted in harrowing detail. By the early 90s, he's effectively squatting in a bedsit: unable to pay his rent, his landlord has turned off the electricity and gas. The root of Rowland's problems appears to lie in his background. The youngest son of an Irish immigrant family, his labourer father seems to have decided he was trouble virtually the minute he was born, for reasons that aren't entirely clear. Rowland initially tries to please, but when that fails, sets about living up to the billing. Insecurity plays out as screw-you aggression: compulsively thieving and fighting, he is a regular fixture in the juvenile courts. It makes for a picaresque story, albeit one that you occasionally read in a state of dread – oh God, what's he going to do next? – and Rowland tells it with an impressive lack of self-pity. Quite the opposite. Before, during and after Dexys' success, Rowland's tone is almost self-lacerating, filled with apologies directed at everyone from the girlfriend he gets pregnant, then abandons (he finally meets his daughter in her 30s) to David Bowie (who offers Dexys a support slot, only for Rowland to call him 'a poor man's Bryan Ferry' on stage). 'I was,' he offers flatly at one point, 'such a dick.' If anything, the reader could do with hearing more about what Rowland got right: the actual music Dexys released is almost uniformly magnificent, but here it often feels a little overshadowed, drowned out by the ructions surrounding its making, or by the author's nagging sense of 'what if?' But Bless Me Father is still powerful and oddly persuasive. Even as he seems to despair of himself, you wind up rooting for Rowland, never more so than when he conquers his addictions and releases his 1999 comeback album, My Beauty. A collection of cover versions, he promotes it while exploring his 'feminine side', in makeup, dresses and heels. The incredulity and hostility this provokes makes for sobering reading: a useful corrective to the current wave of rosy-hued 90s nostalgia. The album itself was reissued in 2020 to widespread acclaim, part of a fresh, if intermittent, wave of Dexys activity that sober and reflective Rowland seems less minded to find fault with: he ends Bless Me Father as content as you expect he's ever going to be. Bless Me Father by Kevin Rowland is published by Ebury Spotlight (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Times
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Poor old Kevin Rowland — the popstar who had no fun
During the recording of Dexys Midnight Runners' third album, Don't Stand Me Down, their frontman, Kevin Rowland, would spend his nights kerb crawling through Paddington in London. 'I rarely picked anyone up,' he writes in his blazingly honest autobiography, Bless Me Father, 'It was secret, lonely and I hated myself for it.' Mixing the album in New York a couple of months later, he shunned the clubby cross-pollinations of the downtown scene in 1985 and chose to stay in uptown hotels with 'middle-aged businessmen', resentfully paying for company in hostess bars. It's no surprise that the sex-drugs-rock'n'roll trinity can ruin lives, but few people can have had so little fun being a pop star as Rowland. This, it's important to remember, is a man with two No 1 singles — Geno and Come On Eileen — under his belt, a young soul rebel in his prime grimly forking out for female companionship. When his band broke up in 1987 he had a horrid revelation: 'I'd been a f***ing pop star, the thing I dreamt about when I was a kid, and I missed it! I'd missed the whole f***ing thing.' With Bless Me Father he unpicks the reasons he so often felt distanced from his own life — wildly uptight, never living in the moment, constantly riddled by doubt and jealousy. As the title suggests, it's a confessional book — at times almost recklessly candid — but it's also a profoundly sad family memoir that grapples with Rowland's lifelong desire for approval from his Irish parents, especially his laceratingly critical father, a man who would frequently take his belt to his son's legs. Born in Wolverhampton in 1953, Rowland spent three years of his early childhood in his parents' native Co Mayo while his dad was establishing his construction business. After returning to Wolverhampton, he followed his elder brothers into trouble. Here he bracingly recreates a scabby-kneed, bloody-nosed mid-century world of derelict houses, Elvis Presley and penny chews. He was drawn to trouble — fighting and theft, but also fell in love with pop music and clothes, both of which his dad found suspect. When the family moved to London, the former altar boy slid further into delinquency with trips to the police station for trying the handles of parked cars and stealing a scooter. His dad told him he would never amount to anything because he would get a girl pregnant at 17. He managed to wait until he was 20, not meeting his daughter until she was a teenager. Nicknamed 'Mary Quant' by Harrow's 'hardnuts', the style-obsessed Rowland had a brief period of contentment as a trainee hairdresser. His alertness to youth culture is a fascinating part of this book. He's as clear on the right kind of tailoring — 'jacket vents,' he writes about the band's 'Ivy League' phase, 'would be four inches and off centre' — as he was then. He cares enough to include an ink drawing of a plaited haircut he had in an early incarnation of Dexys for which no photographic evidence exists. His punk band the Killjoys didn't fulfil that yearning for precision. It was only when he formed Dexys Midnight Runners with the guitarist Kevin Archer in Birmingham in 1978 that he found the portal to his potent reimagining of Van Morrison's ineffable spiritual soul and the art-pop world-building of Roxy Music. They were, superficially at least, a gang, entering gigs from the front with their holdalls over their shoulders — the team that met in caffs, as their 1980 debut, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, put it, clocking in for work. • Kevin Rowland: 'That guy in Dexys was a controlling nightmare' Pop memoirs can be a score-settling opportunity (think of Morrissey's 2013 Autobiography), but Bless Me Father is peppered with apologies to girlfriends, business associates and even the Pogues singer Shane MacGowan, whom Rowland once called 'stage Irish'. The most notable apology comes years after an incident in 1983 when Dexys supported David Bowie in Paris. Rowland was so incensed by the front rows chanting for the headliner he unleashed a tirade: 'You're f***ing stupid because he's nothing but a pale imitation of Bryan Ferry.' Inevitably the band didn't play a second night and years later he wrote Bowie a contrite letter, but 'I didn't get a reply'. This sense of self-sabotage deepens the melancholy that hangs over his story. Rowland's sins are often less entertaining or acceptable than standard rock'n'roll antics: he admits to controlling behaviour with women and confesses that he scuppered his brother's studio business out of jealousy. He recognises the chill as the industry started to distance itself from him — no interviews and record company employees giving him nothing but a 'quick smile'. His post-Dexys descent into cocaine addiction was brutal, and rock bottom unfolded in a Willesden bedsit where he couldn't scrape together enough coins for a box of fish fingers. There is redemption: Rowland established a relationship with his daughter and his grandchildren, got clean, acknowledged his feminine side in 1999 with the solo album My Beauty and reunited Dexys for some acclaimed albums (including The Feminine Divine in 2023) and shows. After therapy he was reconciled with his father, finding new sweetness in his old age. However, fans will have to work hard to fill in Dexys' musical power and stage glory when there's so much about masturbation and bankruptcy. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List In 1982, shortly after hitting the top of the charts with Come On Eileen, Dexys Midnight Runners played Coventry Apollo with Rowland's family in attendance. 'I felt truly successful … as I sat in this beautiful dressing room before going out to perform to a sold-out theatre,' Rowland says. Yet as soon as his dad walked backstage he started knocking the brickwork saying, 'These walls aren't built properly,' again diminishing his son. Bless Me Father allows you inside Rowland's remarkable head, but also reveals what happens when the walls aren't built properly from the start, when there's a crack in the foundations that fame can't fill. Bless Me Father: A Life Story by Kevin Rowland (Ebury £25 pp400). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
